5.23.2007

IBM Unleashes 4.7 GHz POWER6 Microprocessor

IBM just launched the dual-core 64-bit POWER6 processor running at 4.7 GHz, which doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it.

The POWER6 processor is a result of a five-year R&D period, is composed of 790 million transistors and is built using IBM’s 65nm process technology. IBM scientists targeted the way instructions are executed inside the chip to improve performance. For example, in the POWER6, the number of pipeline stages – the chunks of operations that must be completed in a single cycle of clock time – are kept static, but each stage is made faster, removing unnecessary work and doing more in parallel. As a result, execution time is reduced.

Earlier this year, IBM hinted that its new POWER6 architecture may hit frequencies higher than 5 GHz.

If Moore's law continues to hold, then around January 2009 you'll be reporting here on the first 10 GHz chip.

By 2020, the time when Moore's Law is said to reach its physical limits, we'll be seeing chips pass the 1,000 GHz range, which means that, if the price remains stable at a $1,000.00, then for a million dollars one can hyper network 1,000 of these boxes to create a co-processing in parallel machine that can run over a million GHz.

Looked at another way, the cost of GHz of CPU power is now at about $%200 per Ghz, if the $1,000 price point holds it will drop to $1 per GHz, which should please Nicholas Negroponte to no end.

To say that radical changes, in all strata of our society, will result of this rapid increase of CPU processing power is a gross understatement.

That being said, I can't wait until the Sony PS3 gets turned into a handheld unit like the current PSP.